COVINGTON, Ga. — A county commissioner is explaining his recent decision to vote to offer the government's longtime attorney a six-month contract to head a new in-house legal department.
District 2 Commissioner Demond Mason said the contractual agreements for the county attorney, county manager and county clerk are all up for discussion and consideration at the beginning of each calendar year.
"A six-month contractual agreement will be approximately 30 days longer than the normal discussion (and) consideration for the county attorney’s contract review, as of August 2021," Mason said.
"All in-house county attorney contractual agreements will resume to a 12-month discussion (and) consideration period, as of the first quarter of 2022," he said.
Mason was responding to a question about complaints from some community members recently about the length of the contract offer to Martin despite her being the main attorney serving Newton County government for the law firm Jarrard & Davis for six years.
The Board on Aug. 24 voted 3-2 to offer a six-month contract to Martin to lead the new in-house department overseeing legal work for most of the county government .
Board members voted after hearing from five candidates for the $185,000 per year position and narrowing the candidates down to two finalists, including Martin and Serena Nowell.
Nowell, a real estate agent, served in the city attorney's office for the city of Atlanta from 1999 to 2009, rising to deputy city attorney. She then served in the same capacity from March 2019 to December 2020 after working in two private law firms representing local governments in Metro Atlanta for a total of 10 years.
Martin's work has included guiding the county government through legal challenges from a company seeking to build a private landfill, an alleged wrongful termination of a former recreation director, and its pay rate for some constitutional officers, among others.
She also provides insurance defense counsel for the Association County Commissioners of Georgia and two private insurance companies for municipal liability claims, including defense of personal injury cases and employment matters, according to a resume she provided the county.
Martin has been a partner in local government-focused Jarrard & Davis firm since 2012. She also worked for an Atlanta law firm specializing in workers compensation and other employment-related claims for four years.
Mason, District 3 Commissioner Alana Sanders and District 4 Commissioner J.C. Henderson voted for the six-month contract offer to Martin while commissioners Edwards and Ronnie Cowan of District 5 supported an open-ended contract offer.
Henderson said after the meeting he wanted a six-month offer so the Board could review the attorney, County Manager Lloyd Kerr and longtime County Clerk Jackie Smith when their positions come up for renewal around the same time.
"It's about work performance," Henderson said. "I love (Martin) but this is something that is very important to the citizens of Newton County."
An emailed request for comment about the contract offer to Sanders last week returned with the reply she was out of the office until today, Sept. 7. She had not responded to the request this morning.
The Board has heard calls for creating its own in-house law department since at least 2009 because of legal costs found to be considerably higher than surrounding counties.
In 2015, the Board voted to fire a Covington-based law firm led by Tommy Craig that it had employed for 39 years amid questions about rising costs and his work as a consultant on a multi-million-dollar reservoir project the Board ultimately scrapped.
Then, after voting the same year to hire an in-house attorney, board members voted to hire Jarrard & Davis on an interim basis and decided to employ the government-focused firm full time the following year.
Chairman Marcello Banes in 2020 asked the Board to consider hiring a staff attorney as a cost-saving measure, The county put out calls for applicants earlier this year.
The sheriff's office has continued to use Craig’s law firm to represent it despite most of the rest of the county government using Jarrard & Davis as the fulltime attorney since 2015.
